Visions and Revisions
(Re)constructing Science Fiction
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
416 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2005
The former editor of Science Fiction Studies, Robert M. Philmus now casts his expert eye on a diverse range of short stories and novels by the premier creators of science fiction, including George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and Ursula LeGuin. With essays on such masters of the genre as Stanislaw Lem, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick, the volume provides an in-depth textual examination of science fiction as a truly "revisionary" genre. Visions and Revisions will be of immense value to scholars of literature and science fiction studies.
Carl Freedman
“Philmus succeeds in illuminating every work he discusses. . . . The result is some of the best close readings of science fiction texts that I have seen in a long time, but also a sustained contribution to the theory of genre and to the theory of literature itself.”--Carl Freedman, author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction
Contents
Key to Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Swift, Zamyatin, and Orwell and the Language of Utopia
2. Generic Configurations of A Story of the Days to Come
3. Re-visions of The Time Machine
4. Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text
5. Karel Capek's Can(n)on of Negation
6. Olaf Stapledon's Tragi-Cosmic Vision
7. C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of 'Scientism'
8. Kurt Vonnegut, Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan
9. Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinths of Time
10. 'Elsewhere Elsewhen Otherwise': Italo Calvino's Cosmicomic Tales
11. Ursula K. Le Guin and Time's Dispossession
12. Time Out of Joint: The World(s) of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
Afterword: A Revisionary Construction of Genre, with Particular Reference to Science Fiction
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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Literature and Literary Criticism: Fiction
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